Dan North mentioned at one point in the CukeUp 2015 panel yesterday the notion
in theology of a community being a "bounded set." Since Tom Stuart had been
gracious enough to invite me to participate in the panel, towards the end of the
session I joined the panel so I could expand on Dan’s comment. I pointed out
that the same theology also talks about the notion of a community being a
"centered set." To me, this is what BDD really is: A centered set, rather than a
bounded set. In other words, BDD is a centered community, rather than a bounded
community.

I’m collecting helpful quotes about the nature and importance of design. This is part one in a series of pages of quotes about different aspects of design. Many of the quotes I’ve sourced are about design in general, but also apply well to software design in all its many forms. What other quotes on the nature of design am I missing?

Give them what they need. There is a pairing exercise participants experience in my BDD with Cucumber workshops, where one person describes a commonplace activity to the other. The challenge is describing it without being able to use certain common words. One thing I have noticed, no matter where I have run this exercise, is that very few people actually explain why this activity should even be done. They typically spend all the time describing the mechanics of how to do it, but don’t explain why, and the listener usually doesn’t think to ask. I contend that as technologists we do the same thing to our customers all the time.

Lean UX: Applying Lean Principles to Improve User Experience by Gothelf & Seiden comes in at just over 100 pages, so it’s a quick read. But it’s full of very practical guidance for how to apply lean principles to user experience design (UXD). Published in 2013, it won a Jolt Award. Here I captured quotes and notes I thought were interesting.

It can be challenging sometimes to know how best to persist value objects to a data store, especially if you are using a RDBMS. There are a variety of options to choose from, however, depending on your needs and constraints.

I wanted to be able to schedule publishing new articles here on a regular schedule. One thing I needed was to create a simple mechanism to tell the publisher which posts are upcoming and the order to publish them in.

A recent question from a client: "I attended your Agile for Teams class about two years ago for my company. What are the criteria for determining if a project should be run in a waterfall or Scrum methodology? I am continuing to get beat up by C-level executives stating that if we just run the project in mini waterfalls we can be agile and responsive to stakeholders as well." What would you say?

Lean software development is a subset of Lean Product Development, not Lean Manufacturing. It is foolish to blindly apply Lean Manufacturing practices to software development. The underlying principles of value, flow, pull and waste remain the same, but the way these principles are applied to software development will look fundamentally different.

Annotated list of online resources available dealing with adopting and applying agile practices when developing FDA-regulated medical device software. This list will be updated as new resources are discovered or become available.

What do you do when you’ve updated the favicon.ico file on your server, but your browser is still showing the old one? It’s probably browser caching issue, so if you need to do a local refresh, look no further.

Last week when I was in London I came across Leonardo DaVinci’s drawing, The Virgin and Child with St Anne and St John the Baptist, while wandering the National Gallery in London. It’s also known as The Burlington House Cartoon because drawings of this sort were usually transferred to a board for painting by pricking or incising the outline. With this cartoon, this has not been done, suggesting that the drawing has been kept as a work of art in its own right.

This is a review of the book Implementing Domain-Driven Design by Vaughn Vernon, based on the Safari Books Online rough cut edition. The book is also available on Amazon.com. Rather than try to cover everything, I’ll be focusing on the parts of the book that I found most interesting and helpful: highlighting the things that stood out to me.